How to design the following sequence
Rendering Engine:

First of all prefer Cycles Rendering Engine.
In Cycles Render you make realistic objects, text, characters, etc. And the workflow is quiet simple(according to me).

Modifiers:

Modifiers may help saving lots of your time making objects really quick.

Materials

Main part comes on materials, Materials can be anything that make your render look like real world that are colors, textures. Play with some of the material and you'll get an idea how they work.

Animations:

Learn some of the simple keyframe animations.It is simply moving objects here and there.

The Internet Thing:

There are thousands of tutorials who teach how animations work, adding materials, modeling. Internet is vast and you can learn almost everything. Thanks to Blender Stack Exchange that it has experts that if you don't understand some topics or you have some problem regarding your render, modelling,etc. you are free to ask.
I suggest you to go for tutorials by Blender Guru,  He is awesome.

Hope my answer was clear to you.
All the Best. Happy Learning.